My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I moved to a small farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 2004 on which I put a conservation easement. The community of woods, pond, fields and salt marsh will be forever protected from the ravages of development and industrialized chicken farming flooding in from the north….
Southern Legitimacy Statement: One hundred percent Southern. Born and bred in deep southern Georgia below the gnat line, and currently living in the humid swamps of north-central Florida. If I were a death row inmate my request for a last meal would consist of fried chicken livers, harmony grits. pickled…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in Mississippi and never lived anywhere else. Bipolar Poetry Kindling Every guy I write is you. I type your name and delete it, type and delete and type and delete. (Google is my only confidante) You’re in my brain imprinted just like a flame…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Alex Pickens grew up in Southern Appalachia and has been studying and writing satire for decades, though he is seeking help. His comedy has been widely published and his screenplays have even earned him invitations to Hollywood. In his spare time he reads the Classics, fingerpicks the…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a farm girl who still reaches for her gum boots to go feed the birds. I grew up in the arms of a grandmother who worked 40 hours a week for 36 years in a tube factory and a retired grandfather who, after a heart…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: You can’t go much further south than living in Miami Beach. Although most would disqualify my city as The South, I promise I can fish, cook collard greens, and sing all the lyrics to Southern rap songs better than any true Southerner. I also say “Yes, ma’am,”…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I hail from the Deep South–Hattiesburg, Mississippi. While I now live overseas in Bangkok, Thailand, I make sure to incorporate Southern living on a daily basis. I cook biscuits often, read to my daughter in my best Southern accent, and encourage my colleagues to say “y’all.” It’s…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Though I live in Massachusetts now, I was born and raised in Houston, and part of my heart will always be in Texas. I know some folks don’t call Texas the South, but I always have, seeing how my mom always had a can of bacon grease…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Dad’s from New Orleans, my mother has roots in North Carolina. I grew up straddling the line between Southern Maryland and Washington D.C. I’ve currently been living in Michigan for 2 years. What I miss most is the warm weather and crab legs! Pigeons Pigeons walk when…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was ten years old when I first visited a hospital. I had been chasing a black snake through an open corn field where someone had left a pitchfork. One of the tines tore through my foot and sent me screaming toward the house. The snake got…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Clinton Myers is a native of Tracy City, Tennessee currently living in Nashville. An attorney by trade, this marks his first foray into flash fiction. The Road to Yonder “One time I was heading around this turn right up here and just on the other side of…
STATEMENT OF LEGITIMACY I still have not gotten over that ‘Shake ‘N Bake’ television commercial from the 70s where that girl uses the world’s worse Southern accent to ask her mother if she can pitch in on the biscuit making. “Cunn ah hep?!” If it were up to me, somebody…
Southern Legitimacy Statement:I believe that in a previous life I was from the Deep South. Not just south of the Mason-Dixon line, but as far south as you can go before wading into the Gulf. The voices in my head have accents, soft and slow. I’m comfortable in heat and…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My SLS is like a country song. At 17, I moved to Texas, got married, moved to New York, got divorced and now I think about my exes and Texas, but not always. Sometimes I think about pecan pie or ponder what became of the girl I…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Honestly, I don’t really have a Southern Legitimacy Statement except to say my grandfather was born in Texas. He was orphaned at 3 (father was knifed in a barroom on stilts, mother died shortly after from a broken heart, although that’s hard to imagine), left home at…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: This work focuses on my relationship with my father and meat, and it takes place in the polarized city: Houston, Texas. Houston is my birth place as well as my homeland. I remained in the South for my undergraduate education at Elon University in North Carolina. Eating…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve known hidden creeks, deep fishing pools and smooth stones under my wet feet. I’ve fallen asleep while watching the morning sun rise only to wake up to watch it set over pine-swollen mountains. Ash In the early morning Ryan Jackson found himself in a tearful sprint…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Although I was born at home in the hills of Kentucky like a true hillbilly, I did not belong. My parents were back-to-the-land hippies from New York and Massachusetts – art students looking to make the world a better place by farming it without pesticides – and…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My Pap was named after the family’s most stubborn mule: Bud. He went by Bud all his life. THREE POEMS Shelter My cat won’t let me hug her, and now I know how my aunt feels when she gets to pettin’ on me, a grown man. Our…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m new to the south. I like it here, but I feel like everywhere I go I’m ‘appraised.’ It’s interesting. When I was at Cornell in CNY, and someone from NC passed by, I didn’t think: Huh, You’re from the South. Everyone I meet (down here) uses…
Southern Legitimacy Statement I grew up chasing off guinea fowls and picking wild strawberries from the backyard. Cupping lightning bugs in my palm, eating pinto beans and cornbread, and licking honeysuckles in my bare feet. Calling and being called “honey, sugar, dumplin’, pumpkin, sweetie pie.” Saying, “I reckon we’ll meet…
Southern Legitimacy Statement Some writers question the right of Texans to claim they are part of the South. I claim that right because only a southerner would write about grandmothers who warn their grand children to not go into the one stall in the bathroom because only “coloreds” go there….
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I attended East Carolina U., Virginia Tech., and NC State U. In 1976, I married a wonderful guy from North Carolina, and we have lived in North Carolina ever since. Once I could pronounce “y’all” as a one syllable word and eat grits, I considered myself a…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Drive east from Southern California and you’ll eventually run out of road. That’s when I knew I was in “the South,” where I could disappear, and the real me could burst forth! Wallpapering bathrooms for a housing contractor. Working in a Timex factory. Thinking of stories that…